The service will also pull in activity on other sites like Google Reader, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa and have inbox integration, so updates will go directly to users’ email inboxes.

The coolest thing, in my opinion and no offense to any of my friends, is the “Just the good stuff” feature. With this feature, Buzz recommends interesting posts and weeds out info a person is likely to skip.

What do you think of Google Buzz? Do you like the idea of having a more socialized email account?

So why would you use social media to market your products? Is it because it’s what the cool kids are doing? I hope that’s not your rationale. If that is your reason, then you’re probably not using it to its full potential.

Granted, the cool kids ARE doing it, but that’s not the point. Social Media Marketing is an incredibly effective tool with a reach that is ultimately beyond being truly quantifiable. Nevertheless, there are techniques to track many of the results of a Social Media Marketing campaign and use those results to determine ROI.

It’s not always easy, but it is absolutely essential to running a successful campaign. More to the point, it’s essential to get your client’s CFO to sign off on that campaign. We all understand the profound value of Social Media Marketing campaigns, but the reason we’re successful is because we know how to communicate that value to the campaign’s beneficiary.

1. Site Traffic: If the goal of your campaign is to increase brand awareness, then benchmarking and measuring spikes in traffic to your website and blog or numbers of followers on Twitter can serve as a rough indication of how a campaign is driving brand impressions.

2. Conversions: Similar to what you might do with an SEO campaign, having your Social Media Campaign tied to specific conversion goals on your site can provide you with very specific success benchmarks in the form of highly-qualified leads.

3. Backlinks: If the goal of your campaign is to build a general following, then you should be measuring increases in backlinks to your Website, blog, wiki or whatever happens to be the epicenter of that following. They can be easily tracked with Google and give you a great feel for who’s taking you seriously enough to link to you.

There are much more involved techniques that we use, but these represent some simple ideas to start with. I’d love to hear feedback and suggestions for other basic techniques!